Al McBride

Al McBride was a Marine Workers Industrial Union organizer and World War veteran held over seventy-five days without trial, beaten so badly at his arrest that several ribs were broken in the Tampa tobacco-strike case of 1931–32. On 7 November 1931 police and vigilantes broke up a Tampa, Florida meeting marking the Russian Revolution; some two dozen cigar- and tobacco-workers were arrested and prosecuted on a framed charge of shooting a policeman. Fourteen were sent to the state penitentiary at Raiford — a total of fifty-seven years — many to the sweat-boxes and Everglades road gangs, in a case the ILD fought as a Southern labor frame-up.